Just Host Hosting Review

Just Host is another Endurance International Group brand, and offers a range of shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting solutions. It’s worth mentioning that Just Host, being owned by the Endurance International Group, is more or less identical to Bluehost [link to bluehost page], one of their other brands.

Shared hosting

Just Host is a LAMP hosting company running CentOS 6 and has a variety of shared hosting packages for anyone looking for a shared hosting package, each of which is backed by their 30 day money back guarantee and run on their Dual Quad Processor Performance Servers.

Starter plan: $5.99 per month full price

Their basic plan starts at $5.99 for 36 months with the price increasing steadily as the contract length goes down (so it’s $7.99 per month for a 3 month contract).

The Starter plans gets you pretty well set up for hosting a basic website, with a drag-and-drop website builder (their answer to other companies like InMotion offering web design services), unlimited network bandwidth, one domain and a year of free domain registration, and CloudFlare CDN caching. The starter package also gets you:

100 email accounts

100GB storage

50,000 files

25 subdomains

20 MySQL databases and 1,000 database tables

Basic Site Backup Pro

A note on ‘unlimited’: Like every other hosting company, Just Host claims unlimited storage, bandwidth, MySQL databases, and a variety of other things. This is not actually the case. Rather, they supply enough for 99.95% of their customers. If Just Host feels that your usage is too high, they’ll send you an email to warn you that within the next 48 hours you’ll need to lower your usage before they throttle your site. Generally though, the limit on unlimited is so high that no one runs into problems.

Plus: $9.49 per month on a 48 month contract

Plus is essentially a more unlimited version of the Starter plan, with the same basic offering and speed but with more of everything, including:

Unlimited email accounts

Unlimited storage

Unlimited domain hosting and subdomains

Unlimited MySQL databases

Spam protection on 1 domain

Pro: $19.99 per month on a 39 month contract

The Pro plan represents a significant jump in price, largely because the servers that the Pro plans are run on have 80% less accounts on them, meaning that each account is given far more computing power. In addition, the Pro plan includes a number of add-ons and bonuses like:

300,000 file count (the others are 50,000)

Free lifetime domain registration ($14.99 p/year)

Free Domain Privacy ($11.88 p/year)

Free dedicated IP ($47.88 p/year)

Free SSL certificate (59.88 p/year)

3,000 database tables

Improved Site Backup Pro ($23.88 p/year)

Spam protection on two domains

VPS and dedicated hosting

Just Host offers competitively priced cloud VPS hosting and instantly provisioned to get you up and running faster than ever. By utilizing open source tech like OpenStack and KVM, Just Host keeps the price down and their speed top of the line.

Each VPS package comes with enhanced cPanel and WHM root access, so you can chop and change your Linux distribution as much as you want. However, like most hosting companies, Just Host only offers support for CentOS, the Linux distribution they use on their shared servers. They also offer multi-account management, which means you can run multiple cPanel hosting services from within one login.

Standard: $24.99 per month

Just Host’s standard VPS cloud package starts at $24.99 per month for 48 months and increases as your agreed contract length goes down to a monthly price of $29.99.

The Standard package includes:

Dual 2.2 Ghz cores

2GB RAM

30GB SAN storage (additional storage is available starting at $10 per 10GB)

1TB monthly network bandwidth

1 dedicated IP (addition ones are $2.50 per month)

Enhanced: $49.99

The Enhanced package includes everything the Standard does, and is $49.99 on a 48 month contract. That increases up to $59.99 for a month-to-month. You get:

4GB RAM

60GB SAN storage

2TB monthly bandwidth

2 dedicated IP addresses

Premium: $74.99 per month 48 month contract

Again the Premium per month rate increases to $89.99 for a month to month.

Triple 2.2 Ghz CPU cores

6GB RAM

120 SAN storage

Ultimate: $99.99 per month on a 48 month contract

Again, the Ultimate increases to $119.99 per month for a month to month contract:

Their dedicated hosting programs are all run on OpenStack and include root access, instant provisioning, pre-installed WHM, cPanel, custom Domain Manager, and server management tools.

Linux

All of the Just Host servers by default run CentOS 6.5 with OpenStack, including their VPS and dedicated hosting solutions. However, both their VPS and dedicated solutions also include root access, so if you do need to change you Linux configuration it’s possible for you to do so. CentOS is the only Linux distribution that they offer any support for.

Like other hosting companies, Just Host runs CentOS for its stability, its affordability, and its versatility. CentOS is enormously popular and over the years has been tweaked and changed to be extremely stable in a shared hosting environments, which are by their nature less stable, with so many accounts per server (all sites being run by different developers). Since it’s open source and there are no licensing costs associated with it like there are with Red Hat, plus its popularity means that finding trained technicians proficient in CentOS is far easier.

Finally, CentOS will work with the vast majority of popular web applications, so no matter what you’re used to working in, odds are CentOS is going to support your decision. There are, of course, benefits to other Linux distributions, but for most developers, CentOS is going to suit your needs just fine.

Further ecommerce apps also available, including Zen, Cube, and Agora Shopping Cart

Conclusion

Just Host, among other Endurance International Group brands, is a nice middle of the road hosting company. Not to fancy, not too expensive, and with plenty of add-ons and server space, it isn’t offering anything special, but it is offering some pretty solid hosting.